The Last of The Mohicans - Development

Development

According to Susan Fenimore Cooper, the author's eldest daughter, Cooper first conceived the idea for the book on a visit in 1825 to the Adirondacks, accompanying a party of English gentlemen. The party passed through the Catskills, an area with which Cooper was already familiar, and about which he had written in his first novel featuring Natty: The Pioneers. They then passed on to Lake George and Glen's Falls. The travellers were very impressed with the caves behind the falls, and one member of the party suggested that "here was the very scene for a romance." Susan Cooper says that the person making this suggestion was Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, later leader of the Conservative party and three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Cooper promised Stanley "that a book should actually be written, in which these caves should have a place; the, idea of a romance essentially Indian in character then first suggesting itself to his mind."

Cooper began work on the novel immediately, while staying for the summer with his family in a cottage belonging to a friend, situated on the Long Island shore of the Sound, opposite Blackwell's Island, not far from Hallett's Cove (the area is now part of Astoria). He wrote quickly and completed it in the space of three or four months, although he suffered a serious illness thought to have been brought on by sunstroke, shortly after starting the book. At one point during this illness, unable to put pen to paper himself, he dictated the outline of the fight between Magua and Chingachgook, which forms a major component of the 12th chapter, to his wife, who thought that he was delirious.

In the novel, Lake George is referred to by Hawkeye as the "Horican". Cooper felt that Lake George was too plain, while the French name—Le Lac du St. Sacrament—was "too complicated". Horican he found on an old map of the area, a French name for a native tribe who had once lived in the area.

Cooper grew up in the frontier town founded by his father, but Susan Cooper notes that as a young man he had few opportunities to meet and talk with native Americans: "occasionally some small party of the Oneidas, or other representatives of the Five Nations, had crossed his path in the valley of the Susquehanna, or on the shores of Lake Ontario, where he served when a midshipman in the navy." He read what sources were available at the time—Heckewelder, Charlevoix, William Penn, Smith, Elliot, Colden, Lang, Lewis and Clark, and Mackenzie. At the time he was writing, deputations to Washington from the Western tribes were quite frequent, and he made a point of visiting these parties as they passed through Albany and New York, even following them all the way to Washington on several occasions, to observe them for longer. He also talked to the officers and interpreters who accompanied them.